SHERRILYN IFILL
Sherrilyn led the Legal Defense Fund, the organization Thurgood Marshall founded in 1940, becoming its seventh president, and has spent her career making the law answer for the people it has too often failed. As a nationally recognized expert on voting rights and judicial selection, she's done in courtrooms and casebooks what Aubin tries to do on screens. We both insist that justice is not abstract, that it has names and faces and consequences.
She's since built a new home for that work, the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy at Howard University School of Law and opened its doors to us. Hosting Aubin's Paint Me a Road Out of Here there, she placed our film about Faith Ringgold, Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Rikers, and Black women's freedom, inside the same rooms where the most consequential constitutional arguments in the country are being shaped. She made a statement about what belongs in the conversation.
And this past October, she co-organized Vision & Justice Now with Sarah Lewis, the second such convening, building on the one in 2019 where Aggie herself sat in the room, as her granddaughter Sadie and daughter Catherine honored her. This year, she held Aggie's grandson Tenzin - through the freshest moments of his grief from losing her - as he made an impassioned, clear-eyed, justice-oriented, and art-historically grounded tribute to her. Sherrilyn has taught him well. He learned at the feet of the best.
Gathering Aubin's community into that space alongside scholars, artists, and movement leaders wrestling honestly and hopefully with the state of American democracy, is generous infrastructure-building that keeps the path walkable.
With her forging ahead, we are all braver.